Don Draper Hasn't Changed at All

This week's Mad Men episode proved it

In this week's episode of Mad Men, Don finally confessed to Megan that he's been on a leave of absence from Sterling Cooper & Partners for the past several months. Naturally, she did not take this news well, since it meant that: A) Don has been lying to her through the winter and part of the spring, and B) Don could have been by her side in L.A. for weeks but instead, opted to sit at home alone, with occasional visits from Freddy Rumsen and Dawn for company.

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"I can't believe, after all this time, you don't know me," Megan said during a phone conversation that followed Don's confession and his surprise trip to California, which resulted in an argument that looked and sounded an awful lot like a breakup. Don's response should have been, "Of course I know you." Instead he said: "I know how I want you to see me."

Those words, with all their implications about the importance Don places on appearance over truth, suggested that Don Draper's priorities have not changed. Despite the flashes of transformation he's occasionally shown — most notably, in season five, when he seemed to be putting Megan's feelings before his own, and in last season's finale, when he publicly fessed up to the orphaned Dick Whitman he actually is — the truth is that Don still wants to be Don Draper, the persona he created, and he wants the world — his wife, his colleagues, execs at other agencies who try to sweet talk him with job offers — to buy into that mystique.

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When the SC&P partners re-offered him his job with a completely unreasonable list of stipulations — "You can't be alone with clients, you're not allowed to drink on the job, you have to say what we tell you during meetings, you must work in the office where one of our colleagues committed suicide for reasons that, in a lot of ways, were your fault ... oh, and you have to report to Lou, who might be the biggest asshole on TV right now given what recently happened to King Joffrey on Game of Thrones" — that's why Don just shrugged and said, "Okay." The reality of his job situation is immaterial. The clients won't know the details of Don's working arrangement. They'll just know that he's back in business and they'll assume he still has the same influence he did prior to that brief blip in his career. (Like his son Bobby, Don just wants it to be yesterday.) Perception, not reality, is what matters.

That attitude manifested itself in other characters in this week's episode of Mad Men, too, including Harry Crane (who cares if we really have a computer or the capacity to mine national and regional data? Semantics!) and, more importantly, Betty. The scenes of Don's awkward return to the office were purposely juxtaposed against Betty's field trip with Bobby to that farm — a farm vaguely similar to the one where Don spent his early childhood — in a way that made it clear there is connective tissue, still, between those two. Like her ex-husband, Betty rode that bus and drank that cow's milk because, following that conversation with her old friend and now working mom Francine, she needed to prove she's the kind of mother that, in Betty's mind, she's supposed to be. Like Don, she still places massive stock in the sense of self she had in the early 1960s, and she's trying to embody those ideals, or at least appear to be doing so. Also like Don, Betty has shown flickers of change, of becoming a more giving person — remember how she nurtured Sally so sympathetically after she got her period back in season five, or the way, at the beginning of season six, she headed straight into the squalor of Greenwich Village in an attempt to find Sally's friend Sandy? But in this final season of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner seems to be telling us that, at their core, neither Don nor Betty has moved forward during a decade known for its turbulent upheaval. No matter how many journeys they take, regardless of the flights to California or the field trips to dairy farms, Don and Betty remain unchanged. They're determined to play their parts — the dutiful husband who surprises his wife with flowers, the punctual man who wears a suit to work at the office, the attentive non-working mother who volunteers to chaperone at school functions — even though, on the inside, they're not really feeling it.

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"I thought they were the reward," Betty told Francine during their coffee chat, referring to the notion that a mother's children are supposed to be the center of her life. "I don't know," Betty added, "I guess I'm old-fashioned."

But actually, Betty isn't old-fashioned, at least not in a June Cleaver, stay-at-home-mom sense. She doesn't always pay attention to her kids and often wishes they'd just leave her alone. She offloads a lot of the child-rearing responsibilities — the homework supervision, the tracking of field trip permission slips — to the housekeeper. And she does that even though, unlike Francine, she has no job or other major responsibilities keeping her from focusing more attention on Bobby, Gene, or Sally.

"Why don't they love me?" she asked Henry after the Bobby sandwich-trading incident that put a damper on that field trip to the farm. It was a question as self-centered as Don's "I know how I want you to see me" comment. Betty wasn't concerned about her children's actual feelings so much as she was about how they treat her and perceive her. She doesn't want to be a bad mom, not because being a bad mother may be detrimental to her children's well-being, but because she wants to be perceived by society, and her kids, as a good one. That's pretty inarguable proof that Betty and Don still belong together.

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This episode, titled "Field Trip," featured a number of references to previous Mad Men moments, but called back most notably to two episodes: the season three finale "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." and "The Quality of Mercy," the penultimate episode of season six. In the former, as Don reminded Roger in last night's episode, Don suggested that a core group of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce employees should start their own firm in light of the company's pending purchase by McCann Erickson. At that point in his career, Don was able to call all the firm's key players into his office and dictate a game plan. He was still able, despite her initial pushback, to convince Peggy to follow him on that path. He was an agent of change.

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In "Field Trip," Don was the one getting called into a conference room, and effectively being told to shut the door and have a seat while the terms of his role were dictated to him. As for Peggy, she wanted nothing to do with the guy. "Well, I can't say that we miss you," she said rather coldly to Don on his first day back, clearly still stinging from Don's attempt to sabotage the St. Joseph's pitch. It's also notable that the same season-three episode featured flashbacks to Don's life on the farm — complete with a young Dick gulping down some moonshine the same way Betty knocked back her cow's milk — and marked the end of Don's marriage to Betty, another parallel to the relationship breakdown that happened between Don and Megan this week. By season seven, Don's no longer an agent of change. He's a symbol of stasis.

"The Quality of Mercy" was the season-six episode in which Peggy and Ted came up with that St. Joseph's Rosemary's Baby commercial — the same one that, as Peggy learned in this week's episode, was not even submitted for Clio consideration. It also featured Don playing hooky from work by taking a sick day, parking himself in front of the TV without knowing that pathetic perch would soon become part of his daily routine. His lack of illness was eventually outed in one of Mad Men's many movie-theater moments, when he and Megan went to see Rosemary's Baby and spotted Peggy and Ted there. Mad Men delivered another of those this week, when a non-working Don went to see Model Shop, this time without his wife. (By the way, Model Shop is a 1969 film about a Los Angeles man on the outs with his French girlfriend and having an affair with another. "He's hung up, dropped out, and splitting from his girl," announces the trailer. Yeah, that sounds like Don Draper.) But perhaps the biggest development in "The Quality of Mercy" was Pete's discovery that Bob Benson had been maintaining a false identity, a discovery that made Pete decide, based on his past experience with Don, to keep that information between him and Bob. For Pete, there was potential power in his knowledge of Bob's deception.

In "Field Trip," the SC&P partners thought they had power because they, too, knew about Don's true self, the one he revealed during that Hershey meeting. Fully aware they could only lose financially by firing him, those partners — including Joan, whose hostility toward Don hurt my heart a little — gave him the worst possible offer, figuring he'd refuse to take it, quit, and relieve them of the responsibility of terminating his employment and having to pay out his partnership share. They kept up with the appearance of offering him his job back, when in fact they were ushering him out the door. But Don surprised them with his okay. Because, like his ex-wife, he believes that being viewed as an SC&P partner, even if his colleagues ultimately don't truly consider him an equal anymore, is far more important than the daily hell he'll have to endure by reporting to — shudder — Lou.

Actually, Don may even know that he won't have to endure that hell for long. He probably senses that Lou perceives Don as a threat, as visually conveyed by Lou's lingering, worried look at the back of Don's head, the ultimate Mad Men symbol of all the power and allure Don Draper is capable of exuding. And if Lou perceives Don as a threat, that means Don is one. Because perception — in the mind of Don Draper, in the heart of Betty Francis, and most certainly, in the world of advertising — is always more important than reality.